A research specialization, as we spent the second section of this chapter pointing out, should reasonably be defined in terms of its object of research, and phenomenography has human experience as its object, as distinct from human behaviour, or mental states, or the nervous system. Now if there were already a well-established science with such an object of research, it would be reasonable to subsume phenomenography under it. The only demand is that this established science would have the object of research as its only defining attribute, and not methods and theories. For example, the field of linguistics has language as its object of research, and any approach to studying language, irrespective of methods and theories, can be included in the family tree of linguistics. Indeed there is such a science with experience as its object of research - phenomenology - which is one of the main schools of philosophical thought of this century. Phenomenology does have human experience as its object of research, but with it are inextricably linked a set of methods of going about the study of experience and theories about its nature, which makes its subsumption of phenomenography problematic, to say the least. From the very beginning phenomenology had the programme of developing a single theory of experience by using a particular method which - befitting a philosophy - is a philosophical method. Philosophers engage in investigating their own experience; phenomenographers, in contrast, adopt an empirical orientation - they study the experience of others. Thus, although phenomenography and phenomenology both belong to a field of knowledge defined by the criterion of having experience as the subject of study, they differ in the ways they go about that enterprise. In phenomenology an important dividing line is drawn between the pre-reflective experience and conceptual thought. Now clearly, phenomenography does not make this distinction: the structure and meaning of a phenomenon as experienced can be found both in pre-reflective experience and conceptual thought. This is why expressions which might strike the reader as curious, such as "Qualitatively different ways of experiencing the second law of thermodynamics", are to be found in phenomenographic writings.

There is a certain similarity between our program of phenomenography and the program of phenomenology as formulated by the founder of modern phenomenology, the German mathematician and philosopher, Edmund Husserl (see, for instance, Spiegelberg, 1982, pp 69-165). He saw phenomenology as being propaedeutic to the empirical sciences, aimed at clarifying their experiential foundations. Phenomenography is focused on the ways of experiencing different phenomena, ways of seeing them, knowing about them and having skills related to them. The aim is, however, not to find the singular essence, but the variation and the architecture of this variation in terms of the different aspects which define the phenomena. The simultaneous awareness of all the critical aspects comes close to the phenomenological notion of essence, although in our case it is temporary and transitional. The set of qualitatively different ways of experiencing a phenomenon is finite but not closed; in particular, scientific discoveries frequently introduce new ways of seeing the phenomenon in question. Phenomenography and phenomenology differ as to purpose. Phenomenology aims to capture the richness of experience, the fullness of all the ways in which a person experiences and describes the phenomenon of interest. Not for the phenomenologist the sparseness of the category of description, or the logical hierarchy of the outcome space which the phenomenographer so analytically derives. The phenomenologist wishes to describe the person's life-world, the world in which they are immersed and which the phenomenological methods bring to light. While the phenomenologist might ask, "How does the person experience their world?" the phenomenographer would ask something more like, "What are the critical aspects of ways of experiencing the world that make people able to handle it in more or less efficient ways?"

Thus, phenomenography and phenomenology share the object of their research, in as much as both aim to reveal the nature of human experience and awareness. To that extent, the extent to which phenomenology is defined through its object of research - human experience and awareness, phenomenography could legitimately be seen as a child of the phenomenology family. To the extent, however, that phenomenology is grounded in a set of particular theories and methods which phenomenography shares only partly, if at all, phenomenography has to be seen as no more than a cousin-by-marriage of phenomenology.